


Rules

by audreycritter



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Angsty memories, Batdad, Family, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, batkids, everyone should get hugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-10
Updated: 2016-09-10
Packaged: 2018-08-14 06:31:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8002051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is an unspoken rule at Wayne Manor concerning nightmares and it's there to make everyone feel better. No slash, much fluff, some mild memory angst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rules

It was an unspoken rule at the Manor, in standing since Dick’s first year there, that any child living as a Wayne could seek refuge in Bruce’s bed after a nightmare, propriety be damned.

Across the board, it happened with varying levels of regularity contingent on recent events, age, the child’s stress level, and Bruce’s stress level. Each tended to avoid him when tension was running high in other areas, but in true moments of desperation, post-nightmare recovery had been known to end or absolve standstill arguments.

And they _all_ had nightmares. It was just the kind of family they were, whatever that said about them.

By the time Damian returned from the Lazarus Pit and was sleeping down the hall again, Bruce could tell while half-asleep and before opening his eyes which of the kids had climbed in at some point during the night.

Because he carefully tracked and controlled his deep and light sleep cycles for maximum rest at an efficient pace, he rarely woke up when they actually joined him in the middle of the night or wee hours of the morning, because his brain intuitively no longer registered them as threats. And there was no waking to talk; as an addendum to the unspoken rule, there existed two qualifying amendments: any child seeking refuge was not expected to wake Bruce to talk about the details of their nightmare unless they wished it (and they knew how to wake him and those times were rare indeed), and in the morning the incident was never addressed except at the will of the child.

They did not _talk_ about nightmares.

Except, maybe, Bruce suspected, to Alfred.

And he was never quite sure how the unspoken rule was passed from child to child; Dick certainly had no longer lived at the Manor when Jason arrived, and when Tim started spending nights there even before...well, Jason was…

That was a whole category of his own nightmares and he did not like to _talk_ about nightmares.

Except sometimes to Alfred.

Bruce himself always slept on his back and the positions the kids picked around him were like a map of their personalities.

The first time Dick crept into the room, wide-eyed and terrified, Bruce had sat up in the dark and flicked a side table lamp on. Dick hadn't hesitated but had launched himself into the tall bed without asking and curled himself into a tight knot of limbs at Bruce’s shoulder.

Bruce had lain awake all night in the lamplight, wide-eyed and terrified, until Alfred had come in with the sunrise and thrown the curtains open, looked over at them, and nodded once to Bruce.

“He has been having nightmares,” is all the older man had said and they had never spoken about it again.

After that, he would occasionally wake up in the morning and be aware of Dick by his shoulder, always curled up, his head just on the edge of Bruce’s arm. Over the years, his size changed but his form and location did not. There was a gap of many years and then one miserable morning, in the months between Damian’s death and Apokolips, he woke in the morning and for a few brief seconds thought he was ten years younger.

It happened a few times after that, until Damian came back to them. They never spoke of it (rules) and Bruce’s heart rallied a little bit within him every single time. They didn't need to speak to share nightmares or grief, and they didn't need to speak to find tiny moments of small comfort.

Jason.

Oh, Jay.

Dick could not have inoculated him for Jason.

Jason was-- is-- such a mix of brashness and cautious reserve that Bruce is not completely certain, but he is _fairly_  certain that the first time Jason had crept into the large room it was because Alfred cracked the door open and gently shoved him in.

His face had been tear-streaked, visible even in the moonlight from the one open window. Bruce had feigned his own sleepiness when he'd patted one side of the bed and he'd fallen back asleep with Jason stretched out next to him.

He'd woken later that morning with Jason cuddled him all along his left side, snoring gently with his face smashed under Bruce’s arm.

It was always that way after. Jason would slink in like a little punk thief in the night, fall asleep a full foot away on top of the covers, and sometime in the night he'd close the gap.

Once, Bruce had tried to stay awake to track the exact moment of transition but it had been a long night and when he'd finally drifted off around five in the morning, Jason was still twelve inches away. In the forty five minutes he was asleep before he had to get up and get dressed for a board meeting, Jason sensed his unconsciousness and he woke with a head pressed against his ribs.

When Jason had...when Jason was gone, the absence of his post-nightmare visits had been like another gaping wound across gaping wounds, and when he had returned there was a period where Bruce harbored lingering doubts about his identity until one morning in the midst of their conflict and upheaval, he had startled awake with a body pressed along his left arm and the smell of cigarette smoke in the room.

He had held himself absolutely still for at least ten straight minutes, just listening to the rise and fall of the chest of a boy who should not breathe. And he was barely a boy; the slight form that had been only fifteen years old once was a broad-shouldered man who probably outweighed him, if the last punch Bruce had taken was any indication. But still just a boy somehow, slumbering on his arm that would tingle with pins and needles when the blood returned to it later.

Eventually, he had gotten up and gone to brush his teeth and when he had come back, Jason was gone.

It happened every so often still.

It killed him that whatever drove Jason there in the night was bad enough to warrant the trip.

And then Tim, after Jason had...well, Tim was bold enough to sneak into the Cave but reserved enough to hang back where Dick would plunge in, where Jason would run ahead. He was meticulous and thoughtful and the boy slept like a rock.

Maybe it was all those years in his own huge, empty house that drove him to seek company when he wouldn't normally admit his need for it, but Tim didn't even bother being quiet.

The first time he had come to the room in the middle of the night, he'd swung the door right open and walked straight in, swung himself on the bed and fallen asleep sprawled over Bruce’s feet.

For a while, Bruce thought he was possibly sleep-walking, but he'd had to rule that out when Tim had walked in once when Bruce was still up reading and had sat on the bed and started talking about the book. He was aware.

Tim was always aware.

Except when he slept, always on the move and restlessly finding what Bruce thought had to be the most uncomfortable spot: his back across Bruce’s knee, his neck at a ninety-degree angle with the back of his head propped against Bruce’s side, leaning against the headboard with his feet tucked under Bruce’s arm.

Once, Bruce had woken suddenly thinking he was being smothered, but it had only been Tim’s stomach on his face. Tim had muttered in his sleep when Bruce moved him, and then had flopped over and dropped both legs across Bruce’s chest, his head tipped backward over the edge of the bed.

Sometime in the weeks after Bruce had returned after Darkseid, there was a stretch of five days where he had cricks in his neck or aches in his shoulder from Tim’s somnolent gymnastics. He almost asked the boy how he was really doing, but, rules.

Then Cass had come along.

Cass, all motion and body during the day, was the reason he woke up in a cold sweat for the first time in years. The security at Wayne Manor was so advanced that his room was one of the few places he felt like he could let his guard down just a little, enough to rest, and he had woken in the dead of night with the conviction that someone else was in the room and he couldn't see them.

It had taken a moment of frozen, heart-racing and then forcibly slowing, unbreathing listening to determine that it was Cass under the bed.

“Cassandra,” he had said into the darkness.

“Shh,” was all she had said in reply, so he let it go.

Over the next months, her visits were infrequent but varied in location-- a chair, inside the armoire after she'd shoved a pile of sweaters onto the floor, in a heap in the corner under a table.

Finally, he had told Alfred to buy a new couch and put it at the foot of the bed and after that, he'd know she was there when he woke up to an outstretched hand clutching the ends of one of his blankets down by the footboard, the arm shot up from the couch.

After she'd spent time in Hong Kong, she came twice, he thinks just because of the time difference, and he'd lain awake listening to the muted sounds of K-Pop music leaking from her oversized headphones. The second time, after an hour, she'd actually climbed onto the bed and stretched out on her stomach and just stared at him until he put a hand on her head and she'd said, “I'm glad you're back.”

He had said, “Me, too,” and she had turned the music back up and fallen asleep. She was gone before he woke up but she'd left a sketch of a dancing girl on the desk.

And then Damian.

Spiny, prickly, arrogant little Damian.

Sweet, wounded, armored little Damian.

If he was perfectly honest, Bruce had thought for a long time that the tradition wouldn't carry over to the youngest.

Then one morning he'd blinked himself awake and had turned his head and there was Damian, next to him, asleep on his back in the exact same way Bruce slept. He hadn't even noticed him come in.

It was a rare occurrence but the details never changed. He wouldn't notice the boy’s entrance and Damian would not ever touch him or move in his sleep.

There was a long stretch of mornings where, in his sleep-addled state, he'd look over when he woke just _hoping_ and every time, it was a reminder of why he didn't often bother with hope.

Then Damian was back and it wasn't the first dead son he'd had creep into his room after nightmares. He guessed that the nightmares had changed some in content, but where Jason slept exactly the same way as before (just bigger, taking up more space), Damian was entirely altered at night.

Damian clung to him. Bruce woke once at four in the morning because his t-shirt neckline was biting into his skin and found Damian shivering against him with fistfuls of Bruce’s shirt in his hands, completely asleep. Titus was there, too, squished up against Damian’s back.

Bruce had turned and wrapped his arms around his smallest son and held him. And then he did the same thing the next time, and the time after that, always getting out of bed before Damian awoke.

It was in those moments in the middle of the night he most regretted what he had done, bringing Damian back, and when he also, selfishly, was most consoled, being able to just hold him.

And now, with Damian back, with Jason home, he sometimes secretly thinks the best part of his entire life is when two or three of them find their way there at the same time, when he can see that the unspoken rule extends across the bonds of forged brotherhood and that daytime squabbles or injuries are set aside.

He even occasionally wonders if it's always nightmares anymore, or if they've begun using it as a way to resolve things they cannot or will not talk about.

It is certainly not an everyday occurrence, not even a weekly one, but sometimes he will wake in his bedroom that is his alone, and Tim will be across his feet and Cass’s hand on his hair. Or he will be sandwiched between Jason and Damian, Titus under one of his outstretched legs and the cat by his face.

And then one time, one time he strongly suspects was orchestrated by either Dick or Alfred and for all his intelligence he cannot figure out how they did it without violating the unspoken rule by mouth or writing, he was at the tail end of a nasty flu and fighting the remnants of fever dreams, and he woke to find _all five of them_  in the California King size bed, muted K-pop mingling with four different snoring styles.

That morning, he woke hungry for the first time in four days and found Dick blinking sleepily at him, Damian hanging over Dick’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Bruce said, turning back on years of wordlessly slipping out of the room. “Let's go find some breakfast.”

“Mm. Okay,” Dick said, jostling Damian. “Sounds good. It's comfy here though, give me a minute.”

Bruce nodded and let himself drift halfway back to sleep. He decided to not even try to sneak out, but to wait and just get up when the rest of them did.

Because what use were rules unless, once in a while, you broke them?


End file.
